Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

Well, I've stayed in meaner digs than these. But a good onshore breeze, while often intolerably humid, cleared out most of the skeeters. Even the ones afraid to carry you home where the 'Big Skeeters' might take you away! Oh, That looks like a 'Honey Bucket', out front. Usually emptied by poor Blacks, these buckets served as an indoor outhouse in most cabins up to the sixties.

Look at the surroundings: this is semi-arid coastal scrub (sadly, it's almost all gone now), so the mosquito threat is minimal, even in summer. Those leaning pines mean a steady wind off the Atlantic, which would make the heat more than bearable, especially at night. You got your path down to the beach, your baby banana trees, your "shooting positively prohibited" sign - looks like Paradise to me.

This looks so unprotected from the local wildlife. My father was in Florida in 1947 and when he opened his box of shirts fresh from the laundry, a scorpion jumped out. I would be unable to rest in this open abode.

The picture makes the scene look quaint, as a lifelong resident of Florida I can tell you what a photograph cannot. The oppressive heat, the swarms of mosquitoes, the pesky feral hogs, rattlesnakes and scorpions. Florida before air conditioning was pure hell, it's not much better since then either.

According to Google, Chaco Chulee is best known for its appearance on a collectible postcard published by the Hugh Leighton Company of Portland, Maine. The caption reads:

"Chaco Chulee"
The House of the Pine Tree.
A Winter Camp on Santa Lucia Plantation.

Apparently there is a good deal of confusion regarding the location; some postcard dealers have taken the notion that this is somewhere in California or the Caribbean, despite the fact that the other cards in the 229x range all have "Ormond, Fla." in the title.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo archive featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1960s. (Available as fine-art prints from the Shorpy Archive.) The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.